


All the Sinners Crawl

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: Phandom Big Bang 2017 Fics [2]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Angel Phil Lester, Angst, Chris and PJ have minor appearances, F/M, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Reincarnation, Sick Dan Howell, You Have Been Warned, also Dan has an existential crisis, lots and lots of angst, mentions of needles, this could be considered a happy ending depending on how you look at it, you might cry a bunch of times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 19:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12755088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: The clock is ticking for Dan Howell, who has had a terminal illness for the past eight years. Everyone tells him it’s a miracle he’s made it to the age of 25. Maybe that miracle just might be Phil Lester, the mysterious nurse who happens to be a fallen angel, cast out of heaven and destined to wander the earth unaligned for eternity. The only problem? Dan’s name has already been written down for heaven--and Phil is bound for hell if he heals him.





	All the Sinners Crawl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nayani Narayan](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Nayani+Narayan).



> A whopping round of thanks to my beta reader, the wonderful [KC](http://flosculushowell.tumblr.com) (who literally shares the same name and sign as me: fun fact!), for having the patience to endure my rants, late-night brainstorming and horrifically messy plotlines. A warm thank you as well to my talented fic artist, [Mariana](http://artlessdynamite.tumblr.com), who picked up on a key motif and came up with the brilliant idea of a photography piece for this story. (Link forthcoming.)  
> The trailer I made early on for this story can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtYL6sHw8sg).  
> This fic is dedicated to my queen [Nayani](http://www.quotev.com/YoursDevilishly), whose vast knowledge of philosophy and galaxies inspired major plot points and dialogues throughout the story. Stay breathtaking, darling.

_“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” Jean-Paul Sartre_

~

Death is a funny metaphor, Dan thinks. After all, most things in life are. But death--death is like sitting down to write a letter to each of one’s beloved and signing at the bottom with final wishes and greetings, thinking that today is one’s last day on earth. Death is like fading into an abstract entity, at times visceral and palpable to the reader of that letter, yet too far gone to be called a presence in the world. It’s like hanging in the balance, having discovered there’s nothing to look forward to, all while knowing there’s nothing to go back to.

_And in the same way, death is just like love. It’s something you can know at your very core and yet never be completely sure of._

Dan lays the pen down for a while to flex his cramping fingers. He’s tried his best not to smudge over the last few lines of this letter, but nothing can help his left hand from brushing over the still-fresh ink that bleeds through the flimsy sheet of loose-leaf.

“Quite a stack you’ve written up there,” a warm voice says.

Dan glances up, startled. The thick-rimmed glasses and jet black fringe are a new sight to him.

The nurse meets his wide-eyed gaze with a chuckle. “All those papers, I mean,” he goes on. “Or are you writing a story?”

“Letters,” Dan replies with a feigned cough and a low clearing of his throat. He finally breaks the eye contact and busies his hands with shuffling the sheets into a neater pile on his tray.

“Love notes? That’s a lot of admirers.”

Dan fights back the urge then to roll his eyes. “Letters to each member of my family, actually.” He sneaks a glance back up at the nurse just in time to see the latter’s visage sober.

For a while the nurse says nothing and instead makes his way round the end of Dan’s bed to check on his IV drip. He grabs the chart clipped to the plastic railing, scans it, and makes a few marks with the Pokémon pen from the chest pocket of his scrubs, all while Dan keeps his gaze subtly trained on his movements.

“I’m just writing notes that everything looks normal,” the nurse says quietly. 

Dan is powerless to control the flush that spreads upward from his neck, both due to the fact that the nurse didn’t have to look up to know he was being watched, and due to the feeling that somehow this man knew exactly how to comfort him in so few words.

The nurse makes a few more scratches at the chart and then returns it to the clip at the side of the bed. After another second’s hesitation, he turns to the opposite wall to check the stock of gloves and syringes in the cabinet, his back to Dan, and Dan nearly jumps out of his skin when the nurse addresses him again.

“You know, someone wise used to tell me that telling goodbye to those you love makes it easier for death to steal you in the night.”

Dan considers that for a moment. “And is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?”

The nurse doesn’t answer for an even longer pause. All Dan can make out from his position on the bed is the steady _swish-swish_ of the man’s scrubs as he stacks new boxes of supplies inside the cabinet.

“Death isn’t exactly how we imagine it,” he says finally. His voice sounds oddly strangled.

“How do we imagine it, then? And how would you know?”

The nurse turns around abruptly, and the easy smile on his lips would belie the wobble in his tone from just a moment before. “All I’m saying is, we grow up with certain perceptions about death, probably religious, but when you actually get to it what really matters is what you’ve believed in all along deep down inside of you.”

“Freudian theory of the subconscious. Always knew it would be helpful to study that.”

“On the contrary,” the nurse says dryly. “What you believe in is much more conscious than you may think.”

“So in my case, then, death doesn’t exist.”

“Well, it’s been kind of proven that one hundred percent of the human race tends to die, so not really.”

“I was referring more to the afterlife.” Dan pouts, trying to ignore the nurse’s lopsided smirk. “Or after- _death_ , if you will.”

“What _do_ you believe about this after-death, then?”

“I don’t know.”

The nurse’s tone grows teasing but gentle. “I thought you said it doesn’t exist.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. I guess that’s what I’d like to believe.”

“Is that why you write so many letters?”

Dan doesn’t answer. His eyes dip down to the ID tag around the nurse’s neck. “Are you always this philosophical when you meet your patients? Mr.…Philgan?”

The nurse throws his head back slightly in an open-mouthed laugh. Dan’s inexplicably fascinated by the fact that his tongue points out at the side from between his teeth as he chuckles. The man pushes the glasses up further along his nose and shakes his head. “They misheard me when I was getting my ID. My own fault, really. I was really nervous and kept joking around about dragons. My name’s actually Philip.”

“Philip.” Dan squints, half as if he doesn’t believe him.

“I don’t like it all that much, really. Just Phil is fine.”

“Okay then, just Phil.” Dan realizes, quite suddenly, that he’s been staring too much at Phil, and he rips his gaze away with an unintelligible mumble and fixes his eyes instead on the messy sheaf of papers before him. A haze has come over his vision and the weight in his head has begun to throb again. 

Though Dan can’t see it, Phil’s brows have knit together in concern. “Do you need anything, Dan?”

“No.” Dan swallows. _Maybe just someone to talk to like this every day_. “Was Emily off today?”

“Emily?”

“My regular nurse. You know, young mother, auburn hair, walks kind of funny… _Not_ ,” Dan adds with a hint of panic in his voice, “not that I mind you taking her place. You’re, um, you’re all right, really.”

“Am I?”

Dan nods a little too vigorously. He still refuses to make eye contact again with the smiling nurse.

“I don’t recall meeting Emily, but I am a new hire and terrible with names.”

Dan’s voice is small. “So...I’ll be seeing you around?”

“It’s very hard to get rid of me, Dan. I tend to stick around longer than I’m wanted.”

Dan pretends not to hear Phil’s last sentence, for although it’s spoken in the soft cadence of a tease, an uncomfortable prickle in his spine just then whispers that the nurse means something completely different. And even though he knows it should make him nervous, all he can think of now is that he is intrigued.

He raises his head again with half a mind to mumble something along the lines of _I wouldn’t mind if you stuck around for a little bit_ , but Phil is suddenly nowhere to be found. Did he imagine it all? But the cabinet across the room has been left ever so slightly ajar, and that discovery brings him a smile of relief; and for the first time that he’s been confined in this ward, he no longer feels the demanding need to finish his stack of letters. 

~

Emily does not recall meeting Phil, either, and neither does Wendy or Brian or any of the other regular nurses he is familiar with.

“Do you just come in on Thursdays?” Dan opens almost accusatorily the moment Phil steps into the room.

“Good morning to you too, Dan. Miss me already?”

Dan will not give up so easily to Phil’s ridiculously attractive grin. He makes a show of narrowing his eyes in suspicion. “I’m just saying, it’s very odd for a nurse to only come in once a week.”

“I wasn’t aware you were watching me so closely.”

“Emily and Wendy don’t even remember you. They’re here all the time.”

Phil just keeps smiling back at Dan with that unperturbed quirk in his lips. It’s infuriating. “If it will put you at ease, then yes, you’re right. I did only come in once last week. But that was because I was filling in for somebody else. Technically, I wasn’t even supposed to start until today.”

“Oh.”

“So how are you feeling today, Sherlock?”

“Offended.”

God, Phil’s laugh is quickly becoming the one thing Dan craves. How is it even possible when he has never heard it or felt it before in his life? Once again a blush rises unbidden to Dan’s face.

“You need to get out more,” Phil says. “Why are you always there in that bed? That’s how you end up obsessing over a new nurse.”

“Oi, I’m not obsessing over you. Besides, you didn’t even see me all week, so how would you know that I don’t go out sometimes?”

“Well, do you?”

“The shrubbery around here is really awful.” Dan glances away and up at the window, partly out of habit, again not answering the question.

“I’ll take you out later, if you want, when my shift’s over. Would you like that?”

Yes, Dan would like that. He would like it very much. But saying yes now would conjure up unbidden hopes: hopes of feeling a warmth beyond this numbness, hopes of feeling somehow alive in the detritus of his thoughts. Most of all, a hope and a yearning to be able to begin something that does not have to end.

“Maybe. I’ll have to let you know if I’m free.”

A smirk. “I take it you get a lot of visitors, then.”

“Not really,” Dan finds himself replying, without meaning to actually tell the truth.

“But you have so many people you write letters to.”

 _Not like I actually send them out all the time_ , Dan thinks. He decides on a less pathetic response. “I’ve been here pretty much a third of my life. Your loved ones tend to get used to it.” Dan flicks his gaze tentatively back to Phil, and what he stumbles upon in Phil’s eyes is disconcerting, a flash of humor melded with compassion--above all, a profound understanding that he cannot describe but which seems to pierce him to the bone.

Miraculously, Phil doesn’t say _I’m sorry_. Instead, he says: “Don’t let yourself get too used to it,” and it’s the one thing that makes Dan’s heart tug.

~

“I wasn’t sure if you’re a coffee sort of guy or a hot chocolate guy, so I got one of each,” Phil announces that evening when he strides easily into Dan’s room.

Dan’s already sat up, mostly, with his legs hanging over the edge of the bed. He knows that his attempt to hide how much his frail arms are shaking from the effort to boost himself up is probably futile. Phil’s eyes snap toward his trembling wrists and, in one fluid motion, he goes to grip Dan’s torso and guide him into the waiting wheelchair.

“I bet you like both and knew that whichever one I picked, you’d be getting something you wanted to drink anyway,” Dan snickers.

“You’re _welcome_.”

Dan somehow finds the energy inside himself to roll his eyes at Phil. It’s easy and it’s natural, and Dan doesn’t know why it seems like he and Phil have known each other for years, but somewhere along the line between last Thursday and today their dynamic has fallen into an irrevocable groove. It exhilarates him and it petrifies him, to have a heavenly taste of what could be and yet still be left lusting for more and more.

The flowers outside are already wilting. Dan knows that the fresh piles of dark, damp soil in a row behind them means the landscapers were just here to plant fresh peonies, but his attention is more arrested by the old ones. They seem to gasp for life underneath the uneven glow of the uncertain sunset. For a minute Dan dwells on the notion that he sees himself in them. It’s an uncomfortable thought and yet half of him finds a recondite consolation in it, and he cannot seem to turn his mind away.

“You’re the first one here to actually take me out without me asking,” he remarks.

“I thought the room might be driving you crazy. There was a time I stayed in bed a straight week through and it was possibly the worst feeling I’ve ever had.”

Dan doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I can’t see you up there. You’re too tall,” he complains with a squint at the silhouette of Phil’s head against the vermillion sky.

In reply, Phil moves to take a seat on the stone ledge that fences in the flowers, and the mortifying thought awakens in Dan’s mind that he rather prefers this view to the row of peonies. Phil’s eyes seem to be smiling at him over the rim of his coffee cup. “I reckon you’re just my height, or even taller,” Phil murmurs.

Dan’s tone is dry. “I wouldn’t really know. I don’t do much standing these days.”

“When was the last time?”

“Sometime maybe two weeks ago.” Dan swallows and fixes his eyes on his knuckles in his lap. “Emily wanted me to. Said she was getting worried about my ‘muscle atrophy’ or something like that.” He stops, draws a hand over his eyes without realizing how much it trembles. He doesn’t like to think of that day. A part of him whispers that he knows that was the day he decided to give up; the better part of him is too ashamed and too infuriated to acknowledge it.

Phil clears his throat. “She’s right.”

“You’re supposed to admire the flowers with me, not lecture me.” Though Dan keeps his voice even, it isn’t without a flavor of hurt behind it.

“Oh, come on. You wouldn’t want to have to bother with physical therapy later on, on top of everything else, would you?”

Vengefully, Dan snaps his gaze back up at Phil. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You know what. Just don’t.”

Phil does know. He looks down contemplatively, pops off the lid from his coffee cup, circles the rim with the ring finger of his right hand. 

Even that one small outburst has tired Dan. He lets his eyes drift closed and speaks in a low monotone from behind the dark stars across his lids. “If it makes you happier, I’ll admit, I stopped writing letters last Thursday. After you left.”

“...I wasn’t implying that you should _stop_. Just, maybe, not pour all your goodbyes into them. Too much practice makes it too easy in the future.”

 _That’s where you’re wrong_ , Dan thinks. “It actually makes it harder...in my experience.”

Phil cocks his head to the side to assess him better. “How old are you?”

That yanks out the laugh from between Dan’s teeth. He opens his eyes again and looks back softly at Phil. “Twenty-five. But you already knew that, from my chart.”

Phil neither nods nor shakes his head. Instead, he hesitates a second and then takes another sip from his coffee. Dan mirrors the movement, briefly.

“You already know everything about me, I bet. What about you? Where are you from? What’s your last name?”

Phil looks taken aback by the last question. After another flicker of silence, he stammers, “L-lester. Phil Lester, that is. Er...I’m from Lancashire. Yeah.”

“Are you sure?” Dan teases.

Phil raises a brow at him, seeming to have recovered himself. “Yes, I’m from the North, thank you.”

“I never would have guessed,” the other deadpans. “Come on, don’t be so stingy. You didn’t seem to have a problem asking all the questions a while ago.”

“All right, then. I’m twenty-nine years old and I just finished studying nursing. This is my first paid experience in the hospital.”

“Any hobbies?”

“...Hobbies?”

“Don’t look so shocked,” Dan chuckles. “You know, hobbies, stuff you enjoy doing. You must like _something_. You look like the kind of guy who does.”

“Well, I’m not really artistically inclined. I do like music, I guess, but I can’t write music or sing or play any instrument. And I don’t think you could really call it a hobby. People-watching, I mean.”

“I guess I can see it, the whole people-watcher aspect to you,” Dan muses. “You seem to know a lot about people without having to ask them.”

Phil snorts. “Or maybe I’m just reading their charts, Dan.”

Dan wants to ride along with the joke, laugh with him and shake his head with a grin, take the easier route. But something tells him that this chance for candidness is rare and it will fly past him for good if he doesn’t seize it now. And the larger part of him craves honesty, something real, something other than this mask of _you’ll get better soon_ and _let’s laugh now because we know just how empty and desolate you really feel inside_. So instead he says: “No. I mean, like earlier, even last week. You always seem to know what to say, or rather what _not_ to say. Even though you don’t even know me at all. And, I don’t know, but it just seems real, and not just meant to make me feel better.”

Phil has locked eyes with Dan and now refuses to look away. There is yet another pause before he speaks, as if he is discerning how deep Dan wants to pursue this path of candor--or rather, how far he himself should go. There is a profound sense of knowing in his look: he understands precisely what Dan is saying, perhaps far more than he lets on, and therefore he is the one between them who truly holds the cards fanned out in his hand. 

“You’re not too difficult to read,” he says softly.

“I beg to differ. Nobody ever really knows me at all. Aside from you now, a little bit, maybe.”

“I wouldn’t have expected that. I can see everything on your face, really. Perhaps not all in your face, but in the way you move as well, or sometimes in the way you choose to look at me or look away.”

Just like the way Dan is looking at Phil right now, he’s looking at him, he’s looking and he can’t--he won’t--turn away. Inside him the fraction of his soul that remains alive cries out: _I think I know you_.

Phil goes on, “Why did you ask me to stop when I said Emily was right?”

“I thought you were so good at reading me. You should know already.”

“Maybe I am, and maybe I do. But I’m wondering why you think you asked me to stop.”

“Because.” Dan almost wants his voice to shake, any sort of sign that this is a sensitive topic and they should talk about something else, but it doesn’t. His tone is steady. “You and I both know I won’t even be around long enough to see myself needing physical therapy.”

“You said you’ve been here practically a third of your life. That’s way longer than anybody else your age would have made it. Who’s to say you won’t live to see this thing through?”

“But that’s the _point_ , Phil. What’s the use of living to see this through? Why the hell does this have to be me for the past eight years? What’s the purpose?” Dan cards his hand through the mess of his hair. “What, is this some kind of cruel joke from the universe, like hey, you’re going to die and leave behind everyone you love anyway, so let’s stretch this out as long as possible and give you a bunch of false hope every fucking New Year’s and see how long you can last?”

Phil’s jaw twitches as he bites the inside of his cheek. For the first time he’s the first one to break the eye contact, and he simply turns his empty cup upside down over the pavement and studies the bottom of it as he draws a long, quiet sigh.

“Or maybe, maybe…” Dan chokes a little bit. “God’s up there somewhere thinking, I wonder how well Dan Howell would react if I just gave him leukemia for eight straight years and then fucking took it all away again. Like, did he think I would get down on my knees singing hallelujah if he finally decided to heal me? I haven’t gone to university, I haven’t been outside the country, I haven’t even made any _friends_ outside this hospital and my home nurse for eight. Fucking. Years.”

Dan wants to cry. God, does he want to cry. But his tears are spent and nothing comes to him this time.

“I guess I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” Phil says quietly. “I always...imagined miracles being met with happiness and...gratitude.”

Dan gives a laugh under his breath. “That’s with the assumption that humankind would do anything to stay alive on this earth.”

“Well, why wouldn’t they?”

“What’s really so good about life down here?”

“Family, friends, food, art, music, a whole bunch of things,” Phil rebuts quickly.

“Something that isn’t so fleeting, I mean.”

Phil has to think about that one for a minute. “But isn’t that just it? Everything that’s good on earth is fleeting. I don’t mean it in a pessimistic way. But like, if you want to find something really good, you end up looking for something that doesn’t last.”

“...And the things that do last aren’t all that great, really,” Dan finishes for him.

“What about love?”

“Does it last, Phil?” Dan demands. “Does it really?” When Phil opens his mouth as if to protest, Dan rejoins swiftly: “I’m talking about love as we know it, between humans. Not heavenly love as we’ve been taught since we were kids. Because who even knows if that really exists.”

Phil lets out a silent exhalation through his nose. He sets the cup down on the ledge beside him, crosses his legs and clasps his hands in his lap. “You know, I still don’t know the answer to that one. If love really lasts, I mean.”

“Settling on a safe answer, then.”

“No,” Phil says, sharply. “It’s never a safe answer to just _not_ know.”

“Oh.” Now it’s Dan’s turn to admit to himself that this is something he never thought of that way.

“So you’re trying to convince me that there’s nothing really worth living a full human life on earth for. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,” Phil repeats, as he runs his tongue over his teeth. “If that’s so true, why do humans keep doing it over and over again? Why is stuff like love and family and all that so celebrated?”

“You said so yourself,” Dan points out. “As fleeting as those things are, they feel great. Even if it’s for a second.”

“Have you ever considered that maybe yeah, there is actually something worth living a full human life on earth for, and it’s not on earth? Some people believe in living it out here and going through everything for the sake of a pretty decent reward in the afterlife.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“I’m asking what you believe,” Phil insists softly.

“Well.” Dan purses his lips, scratches his wrist. “You know how people always try to stop others from committing suicide.”

Phil’s brow arches. It’s apparent he has no idea where this sudden turn in the conversation will take them, but he follows it anyway with his gaze trained keenly on Dan. “Because they’re wasting what good their life could have been, usually. And also because they’re bound to leave loved ones behind.”

“That’s what they say. You want to know the real reason? It’s because they’re scared there’s nothing else afterward.”

The empty cup slips from Phil’s hands and hits the pavement with a rasp, rolls away from them, and he watches it without being able to do anything.

“There’s nothing,” Dan reiterates. “So people try to tough it out out here because they know deep down it’s the best chance they’ve got...at _something_.”

Dan’s not surprised by the small silence that ensues. He knows it’s a lot he has just unloaded on Phil, and now he wonders if the nurse thinks he’s just another nutcase, another product of antiseptic white walls and IV drips and loneliness. Yet still he waits for a response.

Slowly, Phil takes his glasses off and rubs a finger over the crook of his nose. “You think you’ve cheated death if you’ve learned to embrace him. Not because you’re looking forward to an afterlife, but because you think the void is better than your life here on earth. You’d rather feel nothing, than have to feel everything.”

“Well put,” Dan remarks, suppressing his astonishment that Phil took the leap between his little speech and the actual unspoken conclusion he had put out there.

“Well, you’re not wrong.”

And now it’s Dan’s turn to be stunned.

Phil pops the black frames back onto his face, and the reflective lenses catch a blinding sheen of gold from the sun before disappearing again to show his clear blue irises. For a second he had seemed more surreal than usual. “Life is shitty,” says Phil. “There’s not much to celebrate about it. Every moment of happiness is usually accompanied by twice as much pain. Is the joy really worth all the suffering? I guess people can’t decide on that. My own answer to that differs day to day. And people can’t agree on whether anything comes after death, either. The truth is...nobody has the right to try to convince you otherwise.”

“So…” Dan says slowly. “So even if somebody told you they were suicidal, you wouldn’t try to sway them not to do it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you--”

“I said everyone has the right to their own beliefs. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try to stop someone who confided in me.”

The way Phil looks at him just then, the glittering blue of his eyes piercing his own with an unfathomable truth, suddenly alerts Dan to one thing he can now be sure of: Phil is no stranger to the craving to end his own life.

“Why didn’t you do it?” Dan blurts out.

A shrug. “I couldn’t.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t? Somebody stopped you? Or you were afraid?”

“I just couldn’t.” Phil stands up abruptly, blocking the view of the sunset again with his silhouette, and he hastens to pick up the empty coffee cup that rolled away and chucks it in the bin. He rejoins Dan and unlocks the brakes on the wheelchair. “It’s getting a bit dark out, isn’t it? The bugs might start swarming us if we don’t get back inside soon. Come on, you’re probably all worn out and ready to sleep.”

They wheel along down the path together--as if Dan has a choice--with thick tension quivering in the air. After another moment’s hesitation, Dan murmurs: “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Phil replies, a little too quickly.

Dan doesn’t know what to say after that. It seems neither of them do. What is left to say, after all? Dan has half a mind to bury his head in his hands in shame, because only now is he starting to realize just how much he might have inadvertently confided in Phil. 

He’s always been such a mess.

~

_“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche_

~

Very quickly, Dan comes to stop denying that he is constantly watching Phil and that the black-haired nurse’s arrival is the highlight of his week. On some days, he’s even mustered the strength to sit up in his hospital bed and lean against the side rail at an angle so he can observe the comings and going at the nurses’ station from the window at the top of his door. Sometimes Phil saunters into view, head thrown back in an open and honest laugh, and he chats up Marianne, the young dishwater blonde who is usually manning the desk. Phil also drinks coffee as he talks, Dan realizes pretty quickly. And he drinks a lot of it. It’s almost as if he cannot hold a proper conversation without one of those recycled cups in his hands, whether empty or full. His mind flashes immediately to the sight of those hands, or more properly the cords and veins that run through those hands, as they turn their empty cup over and over in a contemplative gesture over the pavement.

Sometimes he wakes up to a strange and crumpled book on his bedside table. There’s never any name written on the inside of the cover, but he doesn’t need to guess, because the scrawled notes among the pages are always written by the same hand. He tries not to read it, at first: at least not the first book that appears there. It is a tattered tome bound in cloth that likely used to be the hue of caramel but bears the telltale rings of coffee drips on both sides. When he finally deigns to pick it up and squint at the spine, Dan just makes out the gold lettering of the title: Beyond Good and Evil. Friedrich Nietzsche.

He reads some of it the next day, and then puts it away at his side as though his fingers are burnt when Emily strolls in to take the daily reading of his vitals. Perhaps it’s the fear of stumbling upon some truth, or the anxiety of knowing that someone, somewhere, at some point in time, dared not only to think things that resonate so deeply with him, but even to write them down as well.

He doesn’t finish the book, exactly. It lies untouched beside him for about two days, during which Phil appears a few times during his shifts for a checkup and little chat with his heart-clenching, crooked little smile.

Dan learns that Phil owns a Pomeranian named Susan.

When the two days of no reading are up, Dan awakes from the haze of his medicated exhaustion to the smell of a new book on his table. It’s not exactly new; it bears the same hurried markings of a reader whose thoughts raced a mile a minute as he turned the pages. It’s green this time, reminding Dan of flower beds about to die outside on the hospital patio. The title faintly reads Existentialism Is a Humanism. Jean-Paul Sartre.

Dan is not unfamiliar with this treatise. After all, his own paradigms have not been rooted in nothing. Still, he finds himself eagerly flipping through the pages, if only to read the book a third time with that other voice pencilled boldly into the margins.

And Phil keeps dropping by, sometimes at the expected hour and other times out of the blue, often bearing two cups of hot chocolate for the both of them and another of his smiles that instantly ease the pain that nags at Dan’s brain all day.

Sometimes they talk about movies. Phil is an unshakable aficionado of the Marvel universe; he also plays many of the same video games that Dan has left at home. Other days, they talk about books, or favorite memories, or even the strangest dreams they’ve ever had.

“Symbolic dreams are overrated,” Phil says with a gravelly yawn one day, stretching, his glasses fogged over by steam wafting from his coffee cup.

Dan cocks a brow. “Thought you’re a fan of Freud.”

“Who told you?” Phil quips lightly. “It’s not about Freud, though. Dreams are just messed up. They tend to just hang around in your head reminding you of all the bad things you’ve done.”

“Phil Lester, extraordinarily lanky nurse with a 2010 haircut and a penchant for Ghibli. I wonder what evil deeds _he’s_ hiding in his past.”

Phil looks as though he wants to laugh, but a graver seriousness weighs down his countenance. 

~

_“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Jean-Paul Sartre_

~

A commotion awakens Dan one drowsy afternoon. It’s distant at first, the noise that shimmers behind his lids, and then suddenly he’s jerking awake as if his body has been plunged into cold water. He sits up--too swiftly, he tells himself when his head begins to spin--and from the corner of his eye, through the window in his door, he catches sight of the copse of bodies moving agitatedly in the hallway.

A young man thrashes from amid the small crowd, his mouth open in an endless scream. The sounds that burst forth from him are broken, inhuman, like an animal. “PJ!” he screams. He’s hoarse and his eyes are bulging with veins of crimson as if the tears that are choking him refuse to fall.

In a flash, Phil arrives from the other end of the hallway, arms out before him. Even at the distance from which Dan squints to watch the scene unfolding, Phil’s flop of black hair and his oversized glasses are unmistakable. Phil slows as he approaches the young man, who is still struggling against the grip of two of the female nurses.

“Shh,” Phil whispers. “It’s okay.”

“No!” the boy cries. “It’s not okay! He has to come back! He’s alive. He _has_ to be alive!”

Dan’s heart wrenches at that, even if he never meant to let himself feel that way.

“PJ’s gone,” Phil says, a little louder this time, but just as calmly, steadily. Dan thinks the young man should react even more violently at Phil’s statement, but to his surprise, it seems to deflate the boy. At the same moment that Phil’s fingers finally make contact with the boy’s skin, the latter sags backward into the other nurses’ grip. He bows his head, runs a hand uselessly through his matted brown hair.

“PJ’s gone,” he repeats after Phil, almost as if asking a question but not daring to hear the answer.

“Yes.”

The boy’s shoulders start to shake. His hand drops from his hair to cover his eyes. Phil removes his own hand from the boy’s arm for a moment, and the sobs are wrenched out of his chest with the most heartbreaking sound Dan has ever heard in his life. Then, only then, do the tears start to fall, and then they keep falling.

Phil nods and murmurs something to the female nurses, who shoot back quizzical looks at him, but Phil just shrugs and says something else that seems to convince the others to release their grip on the young man and back away gingerly toward their usual stations. Phil once again offers the boy a tender touch on his arm, along his shoulder, and as soon as their skin comes into contact, the boy seems to visibly calm.

Dan could have sworn he saw a spark of gold fly from Phil’s fingertips.

Before he can stop himself, Dan finds himself swinging his feet off the bed and staggering into an unsteady stance to follow Phil and the boy with his gaze as the pair move down the hall. Dan draws himself to a halt half a moment later. What does he hope to see? Another loved one weeping brokenly in the cafeteria as Phil stands by?

No.

He wants to see Phil.

Even more than that, he wants to _know_ Phil. More specifically, he wants--no, needs--to know how Phil was able to do that: to quench the flames in another human’s veins with a single touch of his finger. Dan knows he must be going insane, but he will not admit any less. He saw what he saw.

Dan’s head reels a little at the revelation. As much as he might like to believe he pours his heart and soul onto paper when he writes his letters, emotions are still foreign to him. Foreign, unstable, and terrifying.

Wrapped in the horror and the fog of his thoughts, Dan drifts from afternoon into evening, from consciousness into the realm of his dreams. Without knowing the precise moment that he left the human world, he suddenly snaps his eyes open to find himself standing on his own two feet on solid ground, surrounded by glowing street lamps and slick cobblestones and strange city sounds, as the clang of the clocktower in the distance tolls out midnight. He is consumed by an inexplicable nostalgia for this odd corner of a strange city he has never known; and though every nerve beneath his skin tingles with the warning not to venture further, but rather to nestle in the safety of his false memories here, his feet begin to move of their own volition.

He is not quite walking; nor is he flying. He appears to float for some distance, with his bare feet brushing against the rain-washed pavement every few seconds.

Another moment later, he becomes painfully aware that the dragging sound of his skin on the cobblestones is not the only sound of footsteps that he hears. Painfully, because he cannot seem to stop or turn around.

His own gait slows to a near halt at the exact second he wishes he could break into a run. The world tilts upward, then sideways in a vertiginous spiral, and he almost feels himself gasp from the sensation, but his arms can’t move to reach out and balance himself. None of it matters: his heels are rooted to the ground, melded into the wet stone, and not even an apocalyptic meteor could move him if he tried.

An unmistakable whoosh of feathers and a gust of wind throw his unruly curls over his eyes. Somehow he draws the strength to lift his gaze, just in time to catch sight of a blinding white pair of wings, pearly and iridescent as they catch the sluggish beam of moonlight and reflect it back with a thousand times its brilliance. A beat later, Dan realizes there is a figure between the wings. A human figure. Clad in an amorphous shroud of darkness, the figure spreads his arms to the stretch of his wings. His eyes are a piercing blue. Dan can see it, even from five hundred feet below, because everything about this being seems to emanate a pulsing light. It is as if the most vivid colors Dan has ever seen in his life are nothing but a saturated shade of gray before this winged figure.

Dan follows the direction of the winged man’s gaze. There, less than a yard from him, stands the man whose double footsteps echoed his own a moment ago. The man half-turns, startled by the same swoosh that first arrested Dan’s attention; and as he does so, Dan barely bites back a scream.

The man bears no face. Where his mouth should be is a sickly continuance of skin, smooth and shiny and reflective against his chin under the glare of the nearby street lamp. Neither does he have eyebrows, or nostrils at the tip of his pointed nose. The sockets of his eyes are an abyss of unfathomable darkness, interrupted only by the stitches of charcoal marking the two hollows with x’s.

An inhuman sound issues from above. Both Dan and the faceless man crane their necks toward the winged creature. The sound that leaves him sounds deeper than the ocean, more ancient than the first soul that ever walked the earth. The language he speaks rolls out in waves of light that swirl around him until his aura is blinding.

A scream, so very much like the scream of the young man in the hallway of the hospital, rips through the sky and as it does so the heavens are rent apart by a crash of thunder. What cloak of impenetrable darkness was there before tears away in scudding clouds, and Dan watches helpless, openmouthed, as the flaming bolt of lightning streaks out from beyond the universe and strikes the winged figure square in the back.

Nothing happens to the winged man. One thudding heartbeat later, the lightning shudders through his body and shoots out from his fingertips, and then he descends.

The faceless man is also screaming. No sound comes out from his nonexistent mouth. His cry of agony fills Dan’s mind instead, blocking out all sight and sense, and Dan wants to die because he can hear, he can feel, he can _taste_ the sheer terror of this man who knows this is the end.

One swoop, and the winged figure’s hands curl into claws around the faceless man’s neck. The struggle is futile. The blood boiling in his ears, Dan watches in abject horror, rooted to the cobblestones, clocktower still tolling behind him, as the faceless man writhes for seven interminable seconds and then goes limp.

The light vanishes from the winged man’s hands just as suddenly as it came upon him. The sky rolls back with a cosmic groan. Dan’s mind is still ringing with the shriek of death: a new memory to make sense of the strange nostalgia, a new lens of irony that makes his trembling limbs go still. 

The winged man straightens his stance. Dan hadn’t realized the other was crouching. His aura pulses in the eerie quiet. And then the wings fold inward, and he turns fully to look Dan in the eye, at the same instant that the lines of the cityscape around him begin to warp and melt again and Dan feels he is about to be sick.

Because the eyes of the man with wings are eyes of pure aquamarine and steel, and his brows are arched with vengeance and the paleness of his skin rivals the moons of Jupiter.

And his face is that of Philip Lester.

Never has Dan been more grateful for the rush of unconsciousness that sweeps over him.

The next three things that Dan remembers will likely be etched in his brain forever. One, he is falling backwards into the blackness behind him for an eternity before he shoots to the surface of his dream with a ragged gasp. Two, the city clocktower half a mile away, outside a sealed window of glass and the distant blare of horns, is ringing out the last toll for midnight. And three, his vision is filled with swirling blue eyes and a crooked smile and a quivering aroma of the outdoors in the air around him.

Phil is staring back at him, brows drawn together in consternation, as he stands over Dan’s bed at the closest distance he’s ever been to him.

Dan’s eyes flit to Phil’s hand on his shoulder, the hand corded with veins as it gives him a gentle squeeze of reassurance. The other hand is buried deep into the pocket of Phil’s wool pea coat.

Dan swallows thickly.

“Hi,” he rasps out, feeling stupid.

Phil breathes out a chuckle of relief. His visage soon follows, smoothing away the concern, though a tinge of worry yet lingers in his eyes. “Hi,” he smiles back.

“What happened?”

“A pretty nasty nightmare, wasn’t it?”

“I guess.” Dan sucks in a breath, lifts his shaking hands to smear the sleep from his eyes. “It felt so real.”

Phil squeezes his shoulder again, more gently, before letting his own hand drift back down to his side. As soon as his fingers leave Dan’s skin, another wave of horror knocks him breathless. He struggles to breathe.

With a low, foreign sound in the back of his throat, Phil takes one step forward to close the distance between them and wraps his arms firmly around Dan’s bony frame. “Hey,” he whispers. His fingers thread through the tangles of Dan’s hair. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m here.”

Dan wants to fight it--some part of him knows this is wrong, even when his heart cannot tell why--but the panic gnaws at him, and he dares not stare it in the maw. He seizes at the only source of relief and clings to it with all he has.

Dan doesn’t know when he starts crying, nor when he stops. All he recalls is that his next few words are punctuated by hiccups. “What are you doing here?”

Phil’s voice rumbles in his chest against Dan’s cheek. “I came by to check on you.”

“You’re wearing a coat.”

“I was on my way out when I heard you.” Phil’s smile is tender.

“Hope I wasn’t saying anything too embarrassing.”

At that, Phil pulls away the slightest bit and coaxes Dan into making eye contact. “Not at all,” Phil says, his mouth twisted into a wry little grin. 

“Oi, don’t patronize me.”

“I’m being honest. I didn’t hear anything. But you seemed pretty disturbed, so I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

“Well.” Dan draws himself up with a sniff. “As you can see, I’m okay.”

Phil steps back completely, letting their embrace fall into shuddering tatters. Dan’s skin aches to be touched again, but he does nothing beyond fidget and look away. Phil clears his throat and glances about, hands back inside the pockets of his pea coat, before stepping over to the nearest bedside chair, dragging it forward and plopping into it.

“You’d be more okay if you told me about it,” he says.

Dan shakes his head wearily. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Calm people.”

Something like alarm darts across Phil’s eyes; or at least, Dan wants to believe it does. It is gone too fleetingly for him to be certain. Is he only imagining the clues he’s detected?

“My boss noticed the same thing,” Phil says, not really answering the question. “She said I’m good for this place, especially since so much goes on in the intensive care unit.”

“That was Chris earlier, wasn’t it?”

“The one who visited PJ? Yeah.”

“Poor guy.”

“I suppose.” There is sincerity in Phil’s tone, yes, but also distraction. His eyes are narrowed at Dan, peering a tad too intensely, almost as if he had a secret forgotten power of telepathy and is wondering how to use it now.

“What’d you tell him?”

“Not much.” Phil pushes the glasses up his nose. “Mainly just hugged him a bit, for a little while. I took him down to the cafeteria to have some apple juice, which he probably threw up later.”

Dan gulps down the queasiness triggered within him. He knows all too well the feeling.

“He didn’t say much, either,” Phil goes on. “You would think he would, but I doubt now that he’ll be speaking again any time soon. Probably all the things he ever needed to say are futile now.”

Dan frowns. “But they still need to be said.”

“Do they, Dan? Does it even matter?”

Dan feels as though he’s been slapped. An image of the stack of letters folded on his bedside table courses through his memory. “I think it matters. If I can’t say it now, there’s no way of telling if I wouldn’t have wanted to say it later. That’s why writing it down is healthy. It’s good. Almost like...an insurance policy.”

“Feelings and letters aren’t insurance policies, Dan.” In that moment, as the words are dragged out from Phil’s chest like heavy stones, Dan has the sudden and disconcerting feeling that Phil seems far, far more ancient than his smooth skin and clear brow suggest.

Dan tilts his head. “You think writing letters is like killing yourself. Killing hope,” he says accusingly.

“I never said that.”

“Then what are you saying, Phil? You wanted me to stop.”

“I didn’t tell you to stop.” Phil rips off his glasses in a jerking movement, swift and incongruous with the trudging pace of time around them, and he hurls them onto the other table. “You’re putting words into my mouth, Daniel. I never said any of those things. I said letters can’t serve as your insurance policies.”

“That’s because you _know_ I’m going to die, don’t you?”

Phil explodes. “You ask too many questions, Dan!”

The younger boy presses his body against the pillow, suddenly resenting its resistance against his back. His limbs go deathly still as he breathes, in and out, in and out, watching the nurse breathe with him at his side.

When Phil sags back into his chair and speaks again, his tone is gravelly with angst. “It’s hard to be a patient. You of all people know that. Hanging in the balance, caught between the past and the future, not knowing where you stand. But it’s hard for us, too, Dan. The ones who are watching, waiting. The ones who dedicate their entire lives to helping these people even when they _know_ they are powerless to do so.”

Dan doesn’t know what to say to that. With his teeth he worries at his lower lip for several minutes. “Chris really loved PJ, didn’t he?”

Phil picks up his glasses again, wipes them down with the scratchy edge of his sleeve and pops them back onto his face, streaks and all. “Can we just talk about your dream?”

“It wasn’t that important.”

“Just tell me about it.”

“All right, then.” Clenching his fists at his sides, lest he lose the courage to speak if he lets his chance pass him by now, Dan launches into a retelling of his nightmare. He pours it all out into the open: the clock tolling incessantly around him, the sickening feeling of being rooted to an earth that rotated him round and round as he hung helpless in the abyss, the faceless man who was choked to death by a winged creature.

Only he does not mention whose eyes are the eyes of that man with wings.

Once again, Phil’s brow is clouded over with distant thoughts as Dan’s narration draws to a close. “Who do you think the faceless man was?”

“I don’t know. I almost wanted it to be me, I think,” Dan replies. “I mean, at least if my dream self knew that were me, then the whole dream would have made sense. You know, in the whole Freudian psychological aspect of things. But I’ve never seen him before or sensed that I knew him before in my life. Somehow I just knew it wasn’t me. I was the one powerless to help it. And--it wasn’t that I felt sorry for him, because he felt horrid and there was some kind of darkness seeping out of him. But the man with wings, the one who killed him, seemed even darker. He was coming for me. I thought for sure I might be next, and at some point I wanted to be so that it would all be over, but he just wouldn’t come near me. It wouldn’t end.”

Phil nods. “I think I can understand that.”

“So, what? D’you suppose I was dreaming of the good old Reaper? The angel of death?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because I thought it was coming for me. But then it wouldn’t.”

“How do you feel about being able to wake up from that dream, then? About being alive.”

“I told you,” says Dan. “Oblivion is about eight years overdue.”

Phil’s face contorts at that.

“What?” Dan demands. “You still think I’m going to hell?”

“I never thought that,” the other murmurs. “I mean...from your perspective, it’s oblivion that awaits you. Doesn’t that...terrify you in the least? To stop existing?”

Dan whispers: “Of course it fucking does. But how much worse is that than what I have now? And don’t you fucking start to talk about hope.”

“I won’t. Not like it really exists, anyway.”

“You’re real gifted at this whole comforting thing, aren’t you.” Dan forces out a dry laugh.

Phil’s only acknowledgement of the jest is a subtle smirk before his face creases into deep thought again. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, since our last proper conversation. If you really want to tempt oblivion so much, then why not just go for it?”

“Are you actually telling me to go off myself?”

“ _No_ ,” Phil says sternly. “I’m saying, why don’t you just go home, do all the things you ever wanted to do, or at least get _started_ on that bucket list, and then raise your middle finger at the universe and shout ‘come what may’?”

The breath catches in Dan’s throat. He finds he suddenly does not know what to say.

“I--I don’t know.”

Phil heaves a sigh. “Neither do I, Dan. I’m sorry if I--”

“--Maybe because I want to be normal, y’know?” Dan interrupts him. “Not hanging in the balance, but not racing against time, either. I can only live knowing I’m going to die tonight or knowing I’m going to die in fifty years. There is no in-between for me. I can’t just _not_ know.”

“It’s the not knowing that’s hard,” Phil agrees. “But that’s also what makes you brave.”

“I don’t want to be brave.”

“No,” Phil mutters. “Me neither. I wish I could always be here so you didn’t have to be brave.”

The air leaves Phil then in a rush, into a cloud of loaded silence, and Dan almost looks at him. A line has been crossed. This they know. What line that is, they dare not ask.

Hot moisture streaks down Dan’s cheek again. He swipes at it angrily. Half a breath later, Phil has stood up from his chair and come closer to the bed again to grasp Dan’s hand in his and squeeze it. Dan leans into the warmth of his stomach through the layers of cotton and wool and tentatively raises his right arm to brush against Phil’s back. Maybe Phil stiffens, maybe he doesn’t. But he doesn’t move back, and that is all it takes for Dan’s heart to begin beating quicker again with that nameless thing he refuses to call hope.

A few moments after, Phil senses the quivers still passing through Dan’s shoulders, and in one motion he folds himself completely around the younger boy. 

Once again Dan finds himself mumbling utter nonsense into the space between Phil’s ribs. “I’ve been a coward all my life, Phil. After a quarter of a century on earth, it’s pretty hard to change a coward.”

“You haven’t been a coward.”

“Yes, I have. Phil. You have no idea. There’s so much--so many things--I should have said to my family, but...they don’t even have a clue. If I told them now, they’d just forgive me and give me a free pass because I’m _dying_. That’s not honesty, Phil. And telling them then wouldn’t even constitute being brave.”

Dan raises his head to finally, finally meet Phil’s eyes. The steel behind the man’s irises has melted into the warm turquoise of a summer pool, pulsing in its unfathomable depths. Maybe Dan reads something there that marks his resolve; maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the shift occurs within him after all. Or maybe--though Dan would like to doubt it--maybe it’s the effect of this strange man with the softly glowing fingers and the arms that feel like the embrace of a mother, a lost friend. A forgotten happy place. An old lover.

Phil’s face seems impossibly near in that moment. When he whispers his reply, Dan’s gaze dips down to his lips. “Whatever it is you’ve done, I’m sure it can’t be that bad,” Phil says. “I’ve been around for a pretty long while, if you think about it. I’ve seen a lot. Nothing you’ve done could possibly be worse.”

“It’s not really anything I’ve done,” Dan breathes. “Maybe--it’s more what I’m about to do.”

The timeline tangles then in the ragged space of Dan’s memory. His brain short-circuits as the gap between them rushes into nothing, and the blue, blue, blue of Phil’s eyes flares like the sun and the moon colliding before they flutter closed and Dan’s lost in the flickering of his lashes. Their lips crash against each other--it’s a streak of pure heat and ice--and darkness swirls with the rainbow of fire behind his eyelids.

The grip of those arms around him tightens. Hands scrape his scalp through his hair, teeth tease at his lower lip. Dan’s standing--floating--flying--and everything within him _moves_ , it moves of its own volition, singing a silent melody of his forgotten euphoria. His heart could never have been beating before, because now its pulse is thundering in his ears and it maddens him, consumes him, it _is_ him.

The length of several breaths later, he hears it: another thump, and another thump, the beat of Phil’s heart thudding against his.

And they breathe. Just breathe.

They breathe together.

~

_”He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Friedrich Nietzsche_

~

It feels as though a day and a minute have passed when Dan wakes up, but the clock on the wall has frozen at the same hour. He doesn’t wake up, exactly. Rather, he has been spinning uncontrollably in another dimension of his consciousness--a higher one--and only now has he drifted back to reality, to dim sensations, to faded memories and escaping awareness.

He’s lying down on his side, face buried into a dark mass of cotton. Arms around him. Tattooed on his brain, sizzling with the fire of his desire, the ephemeral memory of warm lips engulfing his.

“I don’t know why I did that,” he whispers.

It’s Phil’s voice that replies. Dan is unsure why he doubted it was Phil holding him in the first place. “Then I guess that makes you brave, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not going to say sorry for doing it, though,” Dan says stubbornly. He shifts a little so he can breathe a bit better near the crook of Phil’s arm. “’Cause obviously you didn’t _not_ want it, else you probably wouldn’t be lying here with me now.”

The sound of Phil’s grin glows through his voice. “Maybe warn a guy next time, though. We nearly knocked your IV pole over.”

“Well, sorry then, mate.”

Phil’s smile is teasing. “A little more sincerely, maybe?”

“Apology glutton.”

“I am _not_.”

“I--” Dan rolls around a bit, cranes his neck to look up at Phil’s face hovering over him by the stack of pillows. “Uh…”

“Don’t say you shouldn’t have done it.”

Dan frowns. “That was super unprofessional, though, wasn’t it?”

“I’m the one who works in the hospital, Dan. Not you.”

“I know that, you spork.”

“I was off my shift.”

“Ah, so that’s how you’d like to play it then, is it?” A glint sparkles in Dan’s eye. “Roleplaying during the day?”

Phil grins, despite having to bite back a groan. “It’s no wonder you hate to think there’s a hell.”

“At least let a dying man believe what he wants to believe.”

Phil is suddenly and uncharacteristically silent at that. Dan nudges him, nonplussed.

“Sorry,” Phil says. “But...we need to talk.”

“Oh, no. This can’t be good.”

“I’m serious, Dan. Just give me a couple minutes to talk, okay?”

“It might be easier to take you seriously if you weren’t currently limb-locked with me,” Dan stills attempts to jest. He’s heady, giddy from the adrenaline of their kiss.

Phil closes his eyes and breathes out slowly through his nose. To a stranger, it would seem the gesture is one of impatience, but Dan surprises himself with the fact that he knows Phil enough to recognize the sign of the older man trying to calm his nerves.

“I’m sorry,” Dan says, quieter this time. “Go on.”

Phil nods, shakes his head, eyes still squeezed shut. Then he opens them again and straightens half into a sitting position on the bed, in the process drawing his arms away from Dan. He settles on lacing his fingers through Dan’s right hand. Suddenly mute, all Dan can hear is the thunder of his own heart galloping in his ears.

“So you saw what I did with Chris,” Phil says at last.

“Calming him? And golden light coming out of your fingers? Yeah.”

“I have a...gift.”

“A gift.”

“Yes, you could put it that way. I can calm people, but more precisely, I can...heal people.”

Dan’s stomach does a funny thing just then. He feels like he has been seized by the throat and flung headlong into mid-air, flailing in the nothingness, and he does not know whether the twisting in his gut is from the suddenness of his joy or the depth of his foreboding.

“You heal people.”

“I _can_ heal people. I don’t, though.”

“Why not?”

“You know what I was saying a few days ago about bad things from your past coming back to haunt you?”

Dan frowns. “I don’t really follow.”

“What’s the worst thing you can imagine me doing?”

Dan is sorely tempted to revive his previous wisecrack about Phil’s innocent hobbies, but one look at the burning steel in Phil’s eyes quiets whatever residual humor was in him. He swallows, opens his mouth to speak. Nothing comes out.

“Come on, take a guess,” Phil presses softly.

“Maybe beating up a bully to defend someone,” Dan finally replies. He’s actually made an effort to answer the question.

Phil shifts a little and rests his right hand behind his head on the pillow. He gives Dan’s hand, which is still locked with his, another small squeeze. “What makes you think that?”

“Well, there are lots of things that are against the Ten Commandments, aren’t there? Stealing, cheating, coveting, idolatry, murder...I figured if we were talking about something _serious_ , it wouldn’t have to do with a lack of integrity. Maybe more a...crime of passion.”

Phil’s lips curve upward in that crooked, melancholy smirk. “You’re not wrong.”

“So, what? You let some fists fly and they punished you by withholding your power?”

Phil seems to wince at the last word in Dan’s sentence. He disentangles his hand from Dan’s for a minute, scratches his chin, then rests his fingers in Dan’s locks. “Depends on who’s ‘they’.”

“You tell me. You’re the one telling me this story.”

Phil sighs, short and abrupt, frustrated. “This is a lot more complicated than I can explain in one night.”

“Then at least try. I promise, I’m not a slow learner. Not like I have anything else around here to distract me, anyway.”

Again the conversation swings to an uncertain halt. Dan, who’s unconsciously closed his eyes at the soothing sensation of the older man’s fingers running through his hair, cracks open a lid to peer up at Phil at his side. The latter’s face is directed stolidly up at the ceiling, eyes wide open and locked on the white nothingness above them. His profile is filled with curves and sharp angles, pale skin and shadows, sunken hollows, like an ancient sculpture of marble that never fails to catch the light on a different facet each time.

Phil’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

“Phil,” Dan whispers. Then again: “Phil. It’s okay. Nothing you tell me will change how I look at you, okay? I _know_ you. I know who you are.”

“Do you, though?”

“So, what? You’re an ex-convict? I’m an open-minded person who believes in second chances.”

Phil’s lashes tremble as he shuts his eyes again. The black frames slip down the bridge of his nose. A quiet breath shudders through his lips. And then, so subtly that Dan nearly misses it if not for the reflection of the light against the droplets on his skin, a track of moisture rolls its way down the side of Phil’s face. Dan doesn’t need to follow the path of the teardrop to know where it lands with a silent plop on the cotton pillowcase.

“It was my fault,” Phil chokes out. 

“No.”

“It was my fault. You have no idea, the extent of what I’ve done. And you need to know...because if we’re going to keep going on like this, you deserve to know what you’re stepping into.”

Dan doesn’t know which part of that statement to react to first: the threat of something far darker than he imagined about to be revealed, or the casual hint that the two of them could be _stepping into something_.

The tears keep coming. They patter, harder and faster now, onto the swiftly soaking pillow. The tracks seem to burn a path of agony across Phil’s skin. Phil tilts his head in a feeble attempt to look at Dan, but he can only lift his eyes so far before he casts them downward again, brows drawn and chin quivering despite his best efforts to compose himself.

And as Dan silently watches Phil cry, aches to ease all the other’s pain with gentle hugs and kisses, he comes to another, far more terrifying revelation: perhaps he loves Phil Lester.

~

_“Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.” Ranata Suzuki_

~

His questions are not answered. Neither is that one silent, gut-wrenching inquiry that hangs behind his emotional epiphany.

He soothes Phil with a hand to the cheek and murmurs of quiet nothings. He falls asleep with his head nestled in the hollow between Phil’s neck and shoulder. When he wakes up again, the bed is empty once more, save for the telltale signs of a body that used to lie there in the tangle of sheets beside him.

An ache, similar to the one he felt last night at the sight of Phil’s tears, blooms across his body. It starts out dull and insistent in the pit of his stomach and spreads upward through his chest and limbs, dissolving into needles and fire at the ends of his nerves.

He needs to see Phil. He needs to sit him down and talk properly, find out everything there is to be said. But most of all, he needs to know Phil is all right.

He has half a mind to get out of bed and hobble out with his IV pole to the nurses’ station to find out when Phil might be back for his next shift, but the better part of him decides to lie back and ruminate. Phil is wounded--hurt so profoundly that he cannot even begin to comprehend the older man’s feelings--and he decides the best gift he can give Phil at this time is some space to sort his mind out.

The petite girl who usually volunteers on Fridays comes in to deliver his breakfast on the usual ash gray tray. He thanks her with a noble attempt at a smile that must come across as listless at best. He samples the oatmeal, sips a bit of the apple juice. When his hands begin to shake again, worse than they ever have before, he sets down the utensils and gives up.

A few minutes later, Dan is overcome by a sudden urge to reach for the sheaf of loose leaf that has been sitting idly at his bedside table for weeks now, collecting dust. He shuffles through the letters until he finds the last one, the one that he never got to finish when Phil Lester entered his life. He pushes himself up into a sitting position against his stacked pillows and starts to read it again.

_Dear future love,_

_Hi. My name is Dan._

_I’m writing this from a hospital bed. Apparently, I don’t know who you are, nor if I have already met you by the time you read this. Although, if we haven’t met when you pick this up, how would you even know if you’re my future love? I don’t believe in soulmates--never have. Maybe you’re just a curious passerby, an innocent acquaintance. Maybe you’re a family member who somehow stumbled upon this letter, though I highly doubt that because where I am hiding this paper is a secret that no one except you should know._

_If no one’s reading this, well, that would make the most sense, wouldn’t it?_

_The truth is, I’m dying. I have been for eight years. Some call it leukemia; I call it an accident of the universe or a tortuous game of boredom from God. Probably, if we’ve met, I’ve already talked at length to you about all this: my views of the cosmos, why I’m here, why I’m still here, what the point is to any good or evil or any suffering or happiness._

_If we’ve already met by the time you read this and I’m gone, don’t expect to find me in the afterlife, because there likely is none. What good is hope for a second chance after we leave the earth, if we can’t just live our life right the first time?_

_Besides...who really wants to live forever?_

_Maybe you can tell, or maybe you can’t, but I’ve never loved anyone before. Of course I love my parents. I love my brother. I love my childhood mates who’ve been there since day one of kinder. Passionate, tender love, though? Never. My mother once told me that once you experience that kind of love, suddenly you will realize the value of living, and more importantly, of living forever. I never answered her, but deep down inside I would ask myself: so what about the ones who never experience that love? Is eternity that intrinsically useless for them?_

_I suppose so. Because where I’m standing (or shall I say, barely sitting, since these poor pillows are doing all they can to support my pathetic body), eternity doesn’t seem so appealing to me._

_And yet somewhere inside me, I really hope I meet you before I die. I hope I get to meet you and hand you this letter and maybe even see your face change as you read it. I hope we get to talk about it, beyond the words smeared on this page, and I hope you question me and I question you and we have a conversation that genuinely changes each other’s minds._

_I hope we get to say ‘I love you.’ I hope we never get tempted to say ‘goodbye,’ even though that’s been the closing salutation of each and every other letter I’ve ever written before this one. There I go again, talking about hope when I don’t believe in it. A human is a walking contradiction. What even are goodbyes? What is an eternity? What is a soul? What is the essence of death?_

_And in the same way, death is just like love. It’s something you can know at your very core, and yet never be completely sure of._

How different Dan sounded weeks ago. He resists the urge now to crumple the paper or tear it up. Gingerly he lays it aside and sorts through the stack for a blank sheet, and without further ado uncaps his pen and begins to write.

_Dear Phil,_

_You know how certain of everything Dan likes to be._

_“It’s the not knowing that’s hard,” you’ve told me on more than one occasion. You said, “It’s the not knowing that makes you brave.”_

_When I kissed you for the first time, I had no idea why I did that. I had no idea, either, why you kissed me back. Does that make the both of us the bravest idiots out there?_

_But last night, everything changed. When you started to talk about your past, and you hinted about all the horrible things you might have done before, I didn’t feel afraid of you. Rather, I started to become surer and surer of why I had kissed you in the first place. You were crying and struggling to speak, and I just wanted to hold you forever and tell you over and over that it would all be okay. That you wouldn’t have to say anything anymore, because no matter what it is that haunts you from your past, I know you. I know you, Phil Lester, do you understand me? I know you. You did a horrible thing, maybe. But you are not a horrible person._

_You are a wonderful person._

_Wonderful doesn’t even begin to cover it. That day you walked into my hospital room with your stupid haircut and those stupidly attractive glasses and that really stupid smirk on your face--in that moment, I knew that I would never be able to find the words to describe you. All the vocabulary in the English language would pale in comparison to the essence of you. Nothing could ever live up to who you truly are._

_You’re kind. You listen. You understand far, far more than you let on. You respect everyone. You care. You love, you love so much that I think that is what made you cry that night I kissed you and you tried to tell me what you’d done._

_You are the only person who thought to take me out of my room for a walk in the sunset. We hardly knew each other, and yet you were the only person who sat and listened through all my existential bullshit. You understood what I meant about death, about mocking it while also wishing for it to come. You respected my ideology; and that drove me to respect yours. I may sometimes sound like a selfish, suicidal young person wrapped up in his own pain, but I feel yours. God, I feel it. Sometimes I’m burning to ask you what drove you to want to take your own life; and I want to ask why you couldn’t. I am so glad you couldn’t. Is that selfish? It must be, because now I don’t know how to breathe anymore without the thought of you._

_And yet I am comforted by the realization that I want to care for you. I want to listen to you, understand you, learn more about who you are and what plagues your past. I know your history is full of pain. Dare I tell you that it will be easier if you share it with another soul? The night I kissed you, the night you woke me from my nightmare, you told me it would be easier if I told you. You were right._

_So please do the same for me._

_Because I care about you. I think the world of you. And I think, maybe, I might love you._

_So many weeks ago, I was writing a letter to my ‘future love’ when you walked quite literally into my life. I never finished that letter. It’s full of crap, really, now that I look back at it. But two things still hold true:_

_One. I still wish that we can stand face to face and tell each other, “I love you.” I still wish, by extension, that that “I love you” does not have to mean goodbye._

_Two. I still believe death is like love. I said before that you can know both at the very core of your soul, yet never be sure of them. And now I would dare say the opposite: you can live your life never being sure of love or death, what they are and what they stand for; but when you come to the point that you must look them in the eye, you know--for certain--they are there._

_Just as I am certain that I will die, I am a thousand, a million times more certain that if I am not quite lost in love with you, very shortly this thing we have will be love._

_I don’t believe anymore in goodbyes. You changed me that way. So perhaps I may have to start believing in an afterlife after all._

_Maybe that means I will go to hell for being a man in love with you._

_Then to hell with us, so long as our love lives on._

_Dan_

~

_”And every day I am learning about you the things that no one else sees, and the end comes too soon, like dreaming of angels and leaving without them.” ‘Angels’ by The xx_

~

The doctor comes by late that afternoon, the last stop on his rounds. Dan doesn’t know precisely why he expected Phil to be the nurse accompanying him, when he’s been aware this whole time that today is Phil’s day off. More importantly, he knows what happened between them last night: all the more reason for Phil to disappear.

Emily is the one who starts to break the news to Dan. The doctor follows, nodding politely to the nurse in a gesture of _I’ll take it from here_.

Dan can’t seem to hear anything. His head is trapped in a bubble, floating, his gaze transfixed on the pen tilted at a slant in the pocket of the doctor’s white coat. The pen is upside down and uncapped, and it drives him nearly insane.

“Do you have any family members whom you can contact immediately to pick you up in the next few days?”

Dan shrugs. “My mum, probably. Or my brother.”

The doctor nods. Emily steps aside as he mutters a few more niceties and bids goodbye, heading back out the door. Dan raises his gaze to meet Emily’s, and the young woman’s face creases in ineffable emotion.

“Oh, Dan.”

“It’s okay,” Dan says. He hates that his voice cracks. “Emily. I’m okay.”

She nods, even though it seems against her will, as if she were about to argue that it’s not okay. Because they both know it’s not. But what is the point of denying a dying man of his last delusion?

“Your clothes are still in the drawer,” she says instead. She nods at the bedside table. “Everything else is there where we’ve left them. Same as your phone.”

“I know. Thanks a lot, Emily.”

“Do you think your family can come pick you up tonight?”

“Maybe,” Dan says. “I’ll call them. But maybe...I might stay here the night.”

She sighs and nods in understanding. “It’s been a rough few weeks, hasn’t it? Get some rest. You have all the time in the morning to get checked out.”

Dan bites back the sudden urge to laugh at the irony of her phrasing.

The sun has just begun its sluggish descent when Dan stirs again an hour later. He feels a bitter rage, a fragmented sorrow at the sun rays still struggling to slip through the skewed blinds over his window. Ripping the IV drips from his arm, he swings his feet over the edge of the bed and stands up. The floor reels upward toward him; he tamps down the urge to vomit and forces himself to place one foot in front of the other. In slow, pained movements he strips himself of the crinkly hospital gown and gets dressed in the massive jumper and black jeans that used to hug his thighs but now hang loosely from his hips. He locates his trainers somewhere under the bed and somehow finds the strength to stuff his feet in them.

He knows where the fire exits are. He’s spent enough time in this building that it would be impossible not to memorize all the stairwells and escape routes.

And that is how he finds himself dragging his trembling frame along the steel railing up, up, and upward, pushing open the steel door and stumbling out into the shock of cold air on the roof.

The wind is far brisker than he thought it would be. Particles of dead leaves are washed into his eyes by the gust that overwhelms him. He blinks a few times and fixes his gaze on the vestiges of the sunset. In much the same way that the dying peonies on the patio arouse his morbid fascination, he is now entranced by the bleak notion that the sun, flaming in the most brilliant rainbows of vermillion, scarlet and liquid gold, is making its last trip around the world before laying itself to eternal rest.

He doesn’t realize the tears have been streaming down his face until he sags against the railing of the roof with no more strength left in him to ebb the flow.

“Dan?”

He stiffens. Then, very carefully, he turns.

“You’re supposed to be off today.” Once again he surprises himself, this time by the flatness and calm of his own voice.

“I am off. But I came to see you.”

“Dear God, did Emily call you? I told her I’d get in contact with my own family--”

“No. Although I did see her when I swung by the nurses’ station. I was just coming up to check on you, and when I didn’t see you in your room, Emily told me she’d seen you walking down the hallway. She was sure you were around the building somewhere.”

“And yet you came straight here to the roof.”

“I suppose.”

“Phil.” Dan is tired, so tired. He sinks into a slump against the brick railing. He hardly thinks he can keep his eyes open. “Phil, you can stop pretending to not know things. I _know_ you know.”

Phil cocks his head and takes a few steps closer until he’s crouched in front of Dan. He seems to debate with himself whether to keep up the pretense, but in the end he apparently decides on the negative. “All right, then. I knew the doctor was going to give you the news today. So I came over to see if you were okay.”

Dan twists his mouth and stares at the rivet on the pocket of Phil’s jeans. With no more energy left for inhibitions, he reaches forward to grab Phil’s hand, the one that is resting on his knee, and Phil immediately reciprocates the touch with a gentle squeeze. A moment later, Phil shifts to sit on the cold concrete side by side with Dan.

Dan asks, “How did you know, then?”

“My power.”

“Ah.”

“I knew it when you kissed me,” Phil goes on on a whisper. “That’s when I was certain. And I--it killed me that you still had no idea. Because you may rant all you like against hope, Dan, but I knew when you kissed me that you had hope in you yet. I could taste it.”

It hurts Dan too much to even attempt to answer that. And yet, a few beats later, he mutters: “Fool’s hope. I always knew it would end this way. Just never knew it would take this long, you know?”

“I know,” Phil replies. “I remember from our first conversation on the patio.”

“Eight years.”

“Yeah. Eight years.”

Dan casts him a sudden frown. “That’s not what I meant. Eight years...is what it took before I met you.”

Phil drops his head into his lap. To hide tears? Or muffle the crack in his voice? Either way, it is a small comfort to Dan that the older man is not so steely and composed as he’s always seemed before. Maybe, in this miniscule way, Phil shares his pain.

“Look, Dan,” Phil mumbles into his knees. “You have to stop romanticizing me. I’m evil, okay? That’s the simplest explanation. I care about you, yes, but you can’t care about me. It will literally kill you. Forever.”

“Just cut the bullshit, Phil!” Dan spits out. “I’m tired of the riddles. I don’t care if you think I won’t understand. Just explain everything to me. Why are you evil? Why will caring about you kill me? What the fuck do you mean? Don’t lie to me anymore, Phil. I’m fucking dying, okay? I swear to God, Phil, I will pull out the ‘dying man’ card if that’s the only thing that will get you to talk.”

“I--”

“Phil, please.”

“All right.” A long and eternal sigh. “Dan, you will have to withhold all you previous ideologies about religion and death and the universe. Because whether you believe me or not, I’m an angel.”

When Dan doesn’t respond, Phil turns to grip him by the shoulders and look him straight in the eye. 

“Do you understand me, Dan? I’m an angel. Not just an angel, though. A fallen angel.”

The only acknowledgment Dan offers him then is the tiniest of nods.

“I did something horrible, unforgivable. I am not an angel of death, and yet I killed a man. For that I was cast to earth and given punishment.”

Dan’s mind flashes to his nightmare from the night before: the vividness, the vertiginous sensations, the utter realism of the terrible steel in the eyes of the winged Phil in his dream. Despite himself, he shudders.

“I know you saw it,” Phil says, softly this time. “Your dream? That was mostly real. It was a memory.”

“What?”

“Yes, a memory. Except for the face of the man. He had a face. I begged them to at least erase that face from your memory, so you would not be haunted by the eyes of the man who murdered you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. _Murdered_ me?”

Phil lets out a huff and runs a hand through his hair impatiently. “Your soul is not nearly as old as mine, but it’s close. In another lifetime, I knew you as Jasmine Hill.”

Dan’s head is beginning to spin. “Are you actually proposing _reincarnation_?”

“Not exactly proposing it. More like narrating it.”

“I knew you. And you knew me. As someone named Jasmine.”

“Yes. And I loved you.”

Dan gapes at him, tongue-tied.

“I was not her guardian angel. Or yours, rather. But I met you as I was roaming the earth, and you and I fell in love. When _he_ found out...he swore no one else could have you. And he put his oath into action.”

Dan’s voice is very, very small. “He?”

“The one you were betrothed to.”

Phil appears to know just when Dan’s mind teeters between doubt and belief, because he reaches out a hand to touch Dan’s arm, and immediately the younger boy’s mind is flooded with images. Stars, so many stars, a galaxy of purple dancing with turquoise. Dim lights. Laughter, the tinkling of glasses. A black-haired man entering the ballroom through the double doors, his duster billowing in the strange wind about him. A sensation of breathless awe. And then hands around his waist, the floating and flying of a giddy dance. A stolen kiss. Fireplace flames devouring a packet of parchment letters. Blue, blue eyes.

The wind is knocked out of Dan when he comes to himself again. Phil has withdrawn his hand from Dan’s arm as quickly as he laid it there. His face is creased with a frown. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Dan says, more forcefully than he intended to. “I needed to see that.”

Why is he crying again? Not for nostalgia, or for shock. He knows this. 

But how can the memory of such an ancient love twist his insides with such euphoria and such excruciating pain?

“He murdered me?” Dan asks.

Phil gives him a grim nod. Visions of blood and fire flash across his irises, such violence and such fury that Dan involuntarily shrinks away from him, as if fearing the angel might touch him again and show him the last memory of his death. 

“He murdered you,” Phil repeats. “And I took my vengeance on him.”

“Then why the _hell_ were you punished for it?”

“My sin was twofold. I, an angelic being, loved a human. And in retaliation for the loss of that love, I took another life.”

“That doesn’t make sense!” Dan cries out. “Why even create beings who can love, if you’re not meant to love?”

Phil looks at him, and in the gray of his eyes there is nothing left now but weariness. “I have asked myself that same question for centuries, Dan. I am angel, but I don’t know everything. I know _nothing_.”

“This whole story does not make a great case at all for someone like me to believe in God.”

“You’re taking this extraordinarily well,” Phil remarks drily.

“You showed me the memories. I _know_ they’re memories, not dreams.”

“Fair enough.” Phil leans back again and toys with the stray hairs straggling over Dan’s brow. Instinctively, the boy tilts his head into the crook of Phil’s neck, and Phil feels himself smile. “I’m telling this because you should know why I can’t heal you.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Dan lets out a heavy breath. “You never did explain that.”

“In the first place, we can’t be in love,” Phil says softly. “But that’s not the worst of it. The first order of my punishment was to stay away from you. I was cast down to earth during a lifetime when I knew you would be dying. I would have the power to heal you--I could heal anyone I wanted; but that’s not the point, because I would always want to heal you. I would have that power, but I would never be able to use it, because if I did I would be banished forever to hell.”

Dan curses under his breath.

“That is _not_ the reason why I did not heal you,” Phil goes on, surprising him. “I would die a thousand and one times in the fires of hell if it meant you would be safe and happy and whole. I would give anything to see you like that, Dan. Anything. But you would end up in hell with me.”

Dan cuts him off with a vehemence he didn’t know he possessed. “I don’t care, Phil. Hell or not, what matters is if we have a lifetime here together.”

Phil answers him with a slow, bitter smile. “And I always knew you would say that, Dan. But don’t you understand? Your name has already been written in the book for heaven. If you die today, or tomorrow, or next week, without me healing you, you will be rewarded with eternal life. _Eternal life_ , Dan. There’s nothing better than that.”

“Isn’t love better than that?”

Phil locks eyes with him then, stunned. “What happened to ‘nothing down here is worth staying alive for’? Where’s that guy who doubted if love even exists?”

“I don’t know,” Dan says fervently, and there’s a new passion lighting his tongue, igniting his eyes. He says again, with more strength: “I don’t know. But isn’t that what makes us brave? Isn’t that what you said--that it’s the not knowing that marks our courage?”

“Yes, but I’m a hypocrite. I know nothing, and I am also a coward.”

“No. No! You are not a coward. You fought for the one you loved, Phil. The one you _still_ love. You knew all along you were up against the cosmos, or whatever old man is upstairs giving you your punishment, and yet you came back and you’ve stuck by my side all this time.”

Phil’s eyes are tortured. “Only because I couldn’t stay away.”

“Fuck that, Phil. Weeks ago, I told you nothing is worth living for. I said, who even knows if heavenly love exists. Maybe it doesn’t. But human love does. You are not just an angel, Phil. You’re not just some celestial being with wings and magical powers who obeys the orders of some higher spirit. You are alive and breathing and feeling and you are every bit as human as I am. And if we are condemned to this short, miserable life as part of human race full of violence and confusion on this dying planet, then who the hell’s to say that we do not at least deserve love to make up for it?”

“But you _can’t_ love me, Dan. Do you understand me? You can’t. You will lose your place in heaven after you die.”

“So I could have been reborn as a woman and then keep my place in heaven? Is that his messed-up way of just fucking with us, whatever we do?”

“Stop.” Phil’s crying again, he’s shaking his head against the wind and drawing his hands over his face. “Just stop, Dan. I won’t let you do this to yourself. Save yourself. I’m not worth it.”

“Phil. Look at me.”

Slowly, timidly, Phil obeys.

“Phil Lester. I don’t care what you did, what you are or who you think you’ve become. My soul fell in love with your soul centuries ago for a reason. You’re kind, you’re brave, you’re passionate, you fight for what you believe in. You don’t like to admit it, but you’ve got a fiercely independent spirit. More than I could ever dream of having. If any of those things was the one reason I fell in love with you so long ago, then it is same reason I am still in love with you today. You are worth it.”

Dan doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because just then Phil lunges forward to cup his face in his hands and capture Dan’s lips in his. The kiss is burning with fervor and tenderness, fear and rage, a quivering between hope and desperation and the raw questioning of love.

They pull away moments later, gasping, chests heaving, their cheeks scarlet and foreheads flush against each other. Phil rests his hand on the back of Dan’s neck and breathes: “The first time I saw you in that hospital bed, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay away. I didn’t show myself to you. I went home straightaway and I tried to hang myself. It didn’t work. I tried pills, knives, a car accident. It never worked. I couldn’t die. And you...you’re right here in front of me, _dying_ by the minute, and it’s not fair because you’re the one who deserves to be immortal. You’re beautiful, Dan. You are perfection.”

Dan shakes with a sad, wet laugh. He kisses Phil again, sloppy and sweet. “Says the angel with the most gorgeous face I’ve seen. But in all seriousness, don’t ever try that again. Who knows if it’ll actually work next time? Doc says I’ve only got three months left, so I’d prefer to make the most of whatever time we have.”

Chuckling, Phil pulls away to catch his breath. “I’m sorry. Definitely won’t happen again.”

“Hey.” Dan turns to dig around in the back pocket of his jeans. He pulls out the letter from today, folded over thrice and crumpled, and hands it to Phil. “I might have gone against your advice and written another letter. It’s my last, though. I promise. And I definitely didn’t say goodbye.”

Phil accepts it with a crooked smile. “You know where the perfect place is to read this aloud to me?”

Dan grins back. “No, but definitely not here.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Dan throws back his head and laughs. He’s grinning stupidly even as Phil hauls him to his feet, lifts his gaunt frame into his arms with one swift movement and steps onto the edge of the brick railing. Dan wraps his hands around Phil’s neck and rests his head against the blazing warmth of Phil’s chest; and there against his cheek, beating erratically to the time of his own rhythm, is Phil’s galloping heartbeat. Dan knows his own face is drawn with dark circles under his eyes and wrinkles across his brow, and he knows that the ribs jut out from his chest and the muscles in his legs may give way at any moment, but right here, right now, in this very second, none of it matters because Phil Lester is as crazy over him as he is over Phil.

And he finds the right moment to murmur in Phil’s ear: “I love you.”

There’s a snap and a whoosh of air before Phil answers him. Dan lifts his head to the sight of the most majestic pair of black wings he has ever seen. Nothing he ever imagined--nothing he ever _dreamed_ \--could compare to what he sees now. Each ebony feather catches the dying light in a rainbow of jewels, surrounding him in a kaleidoscope of blue fire and constellations. When Phil stretches out his wings, their full span must be twice the length of a man’s body. They are strong, formidable, terrifying. But Dan has no fear left in him: only awe.

And as Phil tightens his grip on Dan and bends his knees to take off from the edge of the roof, he whispers back into the tangles of Dan’s hair: “I have loved you forever and always will.”

The magnificent wings lift and beat, up and down, twice, thrice. The wind bursts upon them, and Dan should be petrified by the distance between him and the ground, but nothing now can ever plant fear in him again.

Because, after all, death is just like love: never certain until you face it, and once you do, it is a warm and welcome embrace.

~

_”For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” Carl Sagman_

Fin


End file.
